Saturday, February 17, 2018

The Honda 39102-T9A-T8XX-M1 display audio is the stock head unit of Honda City 2017 Facelift 1.5L E/V variants.

It is able to play 4 types of multimedia files in a USB thumb drive: MP3 music, WMA music, JPEG photo, and MP4 video.

When the car parking handbrake is engaged, the video will display on the screen, otherwise, the video will become a blue screen while the music in the MP4 continue playing. This is a safety feature so that the driver will focus on driving instead of watching video on the screen. If you want to bypass this safety feature, you can search for a compatible "bypass cable" for this head unit and install it.

In order for any video to be playable in this Honda 39102-T9A-T8XX-M1 head unit, you need to convert it into MP4 format with the following custom settings:

Although the car audio manual claimed that it is able to play video in H.264
Base Line Profile format, I have not succeed to make it work with any H.264 video.
The car audio manual also claimed that it is able to support video frame rate up to 30 fps, but if you set the fps higher than 15, the video might not be playing smoothly on the screen.

As the car audio manual has stated that it supports VGA size video only, the frame size is best to be 640x480. If you set it higher than that, the video will be totally unplayable with the "not supported resolution type" error.

Luckily, this head unit is capable to play MP3 in pretty high sample rate and bitrate. Its music playing capability is quite OK, particularly with the 8 speakers in the V variant, despite its video playing capability is really primitive.

Saturday, February 10, 2018

The Employees Provident Fund (EPF, a.k.a. KWSP) has just declared the dividend rate for financial year 2017.

If you still remember, earlier on, EPF has launched its Simpanan Shariah Islamic saving account beside its conventional saving account. Members can apply to switch their account type from conventional to Shariah at their own will.

Year 2017 was the first year of dividend declaration for Shariah account, while dividend for conventional account has been declared annually since 1952.

For year 2017, the dividend declared for conventional account is 6.9% while for Shariah account is 6.4%. The dividend has already credited into members' account, and you can check for it by login into your EPF i-Account.

The 6.9% dividend for EPF conventional account in 2017 is 21% higher than the 5.7% dividend declared for 2016 (last year).

Calculation: (6.90-5.70)/5.70 = 1.20/5.70 = 21%
It is also 7.8% higher than the 6.4% Shariah dividend declared for the same year.

Calculation: (6.90-6.40)/6.40 = 0.50/6.40 = 7.8%
It seems that members who had opted to convert their account to Shariah might be upset and regret, due to the lower dividend in 2017.

According to EPF, the Shariah account derived its income solely from its portion of shariah assets while for conventional account, a total of 38% of the income was generated by its share of Shariah assets and 62% from non-Shariah assets.

The returns for conventional account were enhanced by the income generated from non-shariah investments following the outperformance of global banking stocks, while Shariah account does not include conventional banking stocks due to their non-Shariah compliant status.In addition, equity impairments from shariah-compliant stocks, particularly the oil and gas, and telecommunication counters, has lowered the income of the EPF's shariah portfolio.Is the 6.9%/6.4% dividend considered good or not? The 6.9% dividend rate is the best since year 1996. However, EPF had been consistently declaring dividends of above 7% from 1976 until 1996! The dividend rate had even been consistently above 8% during 1980-1994. So, you judge yourself!
You can click here to check the historical EPF dividend pay-out rates from 1952 until today to have a clearer picture.

Thursday, February 8, 2018

Presto is an innovative homegrown social marketing and e-wallet platform by ACE-market listed PUC Bhd (0007). You can download the app for free in Google Play store and Apple iTune App Store.

In conjunction with the upcoming Chinese New Year 2018, Presto has enabled its users to send electronic red packets (a.k.a. e-Angpow) to their buddies in the app. The good news is, you do not need to top up any money into your Presto account to start sending your red packets.

Click here, and you can receive RM2 from Presto in your account after filling up the online form as shown below. Both new users and existing users are eligible to receive the RM2, provided you are the first 88 users of the day who submitted the online form, from 7 February 2018 until 13 February 2018.

Once you have received the RM2 in your Presto account, you can use it to send out red packet to one of your buddies. Just tap on the banner as shown below at the bottom of the app screen to start sending your red packets.

Alternatively, you can select a friend in your buddies list and there is an option for you to send red packet to the selected person too.

You can send any amount of money in your red packet, but please be noted that you need to send RM2 or more in a red packet in order to be eligible to play the Fortune Blast game.

The secret to get back more cash than the amount you sent is through this Fortune Blast game! If you sent out an RM2 red packet and it is opened by its receiver, you can easily get back at least RM5 from Fortune Blast.

If you are fast enough to blast more than 100 times within 8 seconds, your prize can be doubled to become RM10!

With the money you won from Fortune Blast, you can continue to send out more red packets to the rest of your buddies, and receive more chances to earn back even more money from Fortune Blast.

You can easily earn more than hundred within a very short period of time, even without any need of putting any money into your Presto account to start with. There is just nothing for you to lose, and many for you to gain.

In the end of the day, what can you do with the money in your Presto account? Currently, you can use it to redeem Presto deals. Later on, the money will be resided in your Presto e-wallet, which you can use to make payment at participating shops that accept Presto e-wallet payment method.

Click the link below to share this message to as many of your friends as possible, because you need them to also install Presto app in their phone before you can add them as your buddy and send/receive red packets with them.